OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Lessons Learned from Blockchain Applications of Trusted Execution Environments and Implications for Future Research
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Modern computer systems tend to rely on large trusted computing bases (TCBs) for operations. To address the TCB bloating problem, hardware vendors have developed mechanisms to enable or facilitate the creation of a trusted execution environment (TEE) in which critical software applications can execute securely in an isolated environment. Even under the circumstance that a host OS is compromised by an adversary, key security properties such as confidentiality and integrity of the software inside the TEEs can be guaranteed. The promise of integrity and security has driven developers to adopt it for use cases involving access control, PKS, IoT among other things. Among these applications include blockchain-related use cases. The usage of the TEEs doesn't come without its own implementation challenges and potential pitfalls. In this paper, we examine the assumptions, security models, and operational environments of the proposed TEE use cases of blockchain-based applications. The exercise and analysis help the hardware TEE research community to identify some open challenges and opportunities for research and rethink the design of hardware TEEs in general.
Risk, Resilience and Reward: Impacts of Shifting to Digital Sex Work
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Workers from a variety of industries rapidly shifted to remote work at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While existing work has examined the impact of this shift on office workers, little work has examined how shifting from in-person to online work affected workers in the informal labor sector. We examine the impact of shifting from in-person to online-only work on a particularly marginalized group of workers: sex workers. Through 34 qualitative interviews with sex workers from seven countries in the Global North, we examine how a shift to online-only sex work impacted: (1) working conditions, (2) risks and protective behaviors, and (3) labor rewards. We find that online work offers benefits to sex workers' financial and physical well-being. However, online-only work introduces new and greater digital and mental health risks as a result of the need to be publicly visible on more platforms and to share more explicit content. From our findings we propose design and platform governance suggestions for digital sex workers and for informal workers more broadly, particularly those who create and sell digital content.
Functional mimicry of Ruffini receptors with Fiber Bragg Gratings and Deep Neural Networks enables a bio-inspired large-area tactile sensitive skin
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Collaborative robots are expected to physically interact with humans in daily living and workplace, including industrial and healthcare settings. A related key enabling technology is tactile sensing, which currently requires addressing the outstanding scientific challenge to simultaneously detect contact location and intensity by means of soft conformable artificial skins adapting over large areas to the complex curved geometries of robot embodiments. In this work, the development of a large-area sensitive soft skin with a curved geometry is presented, allowing for robot total-body coverage through modular patches. The biomimetic skin consists of a soft polymeric matrix, resembling a human forearm, embedded with photonic Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) transducers, which partially mimics Ruffini mechanoreceptor functionality with diffuse, overlapping receptive fields. A Convolutional Neural Network deep learning algorithm and a multigrid Neuron Integration Process were implemented to decode the FBG sensor outputs for inferring contact force magnitude and localization through the skin surface. Results achieved 35 mN (IQR = 56 mN) and 3.2 mm (IQR = 2.3 mm) median errors, for force and localization predictions, respectively. Demonstrations with an anthropomorphic arm pave the way towards AI-based integrated skins enabling safe human-robot cooperation via machine intelligence.
A Reinforcement Approach for Detecting P2P Botnet Communities in Dynamic Communication Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets use decentralized command and control networks that make them resilient to disruptions. The P2P botnet overlay networks manifest structures in mutual-contact graphs, also called communication graphs, formed using network traffic information. It has been shown that these structures can be detected using community detection techniques from graph theory. These previous works, however, treat the communication graphs and the P2P botnet structures as static. In reality, communication graphs are dynamic as they represent the continuously changing network traffic flows. Similarly, the P2P botnets also evolve with time, as new bots join and existing bots leave either temporarily or permanently. In this paper we address the problem of detecting such evolving P2P botnet communities in dynamic communication graphs. We propose a reinforcement-based approach, suitable for large communication graphs, that improves precision and recall of P2P botnet community detection in dynamic communication graphs.
DPar2: Fast and Scalable PARAFAC2 Decomposition for Irregular Dense Tensors
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Given an irregular dense tensor, how can we efficiently analyze it? An irregular tensor is a collection of matrices whose columns have the same size and rows have different sizes from each other. PARAFAC2 decomposition is a fundamental tool to deal with an irregular tensor in applications including phenotype discovery and trend analysis. Although several PARAFAC2 decomposition methods exist, their efficiency is limited for irregular dense tensors due to the expensive computations involved with the tensor. In this paper, we propose DPar2, a fast and scalable PARAFAC2 decomposition method for irregular dense tensors. DPar2 achieves high efficiency by effectively compressing each slice matrix of a given irregular tensor, careful reordering of computations with the compression results, and exploiting the irregularity of the tensor. Extensive experiments show that DPar2 is up to 6.0x faster than competitors on real-world irregular tensors while achieving comparable accuracy. In addition, DPar2 is scalable with respect to the tensor size and target rank.
Revisiting the Effects of Leakage on Dependency Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Recent work by Søgaard (2020) showed that, treebank size aside, overlap between training and test graphs (termed leakage) explains more of the observed variation in dependency parsing performance than other explanations. In this work we revisit this claim, testing it on more models and languages. We find that it only holds for zero-shot cross-lingual settings. We then propose a more fine-grained measure of such leakage which, unlike the original measure, not only explains but also correlates with observed performance variation. Code and data are available here: https://github.com/miriamwanner/reu-nlp-project
Continual Learning and Private Unlearning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

As intelligent agents become autonomous over longer periods of time, they may eventually become lifelong counterparts to specific people. If so, it may be common for a user to want the agent to master a task temporarily but later on to forget the task due to privacy concerns. However enabling an agent to \emph{forget privately} what the user specified without degrading the rest of the learned knowledge is a challenging problem. With the aim of addressing this challenge, this paper formalizes this continual learning and private unlearning (CLPU) problem. The paper further introduces a straightforward but exactly private solution, CLPU-DER++, as the first step towards solving the CLPU problem, along with a set of carefully designed benchmark problems to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. The code is available at https://github.com/Cranial-XIX/Continual-Learning-Private-Unlearning.
AIMusicGuru: Music Assisted Human Pose Correction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Pose Estimation techniques rely on visual cues available through observations represented in the form of pixels. But the performance is bounded by the frame rate of the video and struggles from motion blur, occlusions, and temporal coherence. This issue is magnified when people are interacting with objects and instruments, for example playing the violin. Standard approaches for postprocessing use interpolation and smoothing functions to filter noise and fill gaps, but they cannot model highly non-linear motion. We present a method that leverages our understanding of the high degree of a causal relationship between the sound produced and the motion that produces them. We use the audio signature to refine and predict accurate human body pose motion models. We propose MAPnet (Music Assisted Pose network) for generating a fine grain motion model from sparse input pose sequences but continuous audio. To accelerate further research in this domain, we also open-source MAPdat, a new multi-modal dataset of 3D violin playing motion with music. We perform a comparison of different standard machine learning models and perform analysis on input modalities, sampling techniques, and audio and motion features. Experiments on MAPdat suggest multi-modal approaches like ours as a promising direction for tasks previously approached with visual methods only. Our results show both qualitatively and quantitatively how audio can be combined with visual observation to help improve any pose estimation methods.
Steganalysis of Image with Adaptively Parametric Activation
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2022
Year: 2022

Steganalysis as a method to detect whether image contains se-cret message, is a crucial study avoiding the imperils from abus-ing steganography. The point of steganalysis is to detect the weak embedding signals which is hardly learned by convolution-al layer and easily suppressed. In this paper, to enhance embed-ding signals, we study the insufficiencies of activation function, filters and loss function from the aspects of reduce embedding signal loss and enhance embedding signal capture ability. Adap-tive Parametric Activation Module is designed to reserve nega-tive embedding signal. For embedding signal capture ability enhancement, we add constraints on the high-pass filters to im-prove residual diversity which enables the filters extracts rich embedding signals. Besides, a loss function based on contrastive learning is applied to overcome the limitations of cross-entropy loss by maximum inter-class distance. It helps the network make a distinction between embedding signals and semantic edges. We use images from BOSSbase 1.01 and make stegos by WOW and S-UNIWARD for experiments. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our method has a competitive performance.
Multiple Emotion Descriptors Estimation at the ABAW3 Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

To describe complex emotional states, psychologists have proposed multiple emotion descriptors: sparse descriptors like facial action units; continuous descriptors like valence and arousal; and discrete class descriptors like happiness and anger. According to Ekman and Friesen, 1969, facial action units are sign vehicles that convey the emotion message, while discrete or continuous emotion descriptors are the messages perceived and expressed by human. In this paper, we designed an architecture for multiple emotion descriptors estimation in participating the ABAW3 Challenge. Based on the theory of Ekman and Friesen, 1969, we designed distinct architectures to measure the sign vehicles (i.e., facial action units) and the message (i.e., discrete emotions, valence and arousal) given their different properties. The quantitative experiments on the ABAW3 challenge dataset has shown the superior performance of our approach over two baseline models.
Revisiting Digital Twins: Origins, Fundamentals and Practices
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2022
Year: 2022

The Digital Twins (DT) has quickly become a hot topic since it was proposed. It not only appears in all kinds of commercial propaganda, but also is widely quoted by academic circles. However, there are misstatements and misuse of the term DT in business and academy. This paper revisits Digital Twins and defines it to be a more advanced system/product/service modelling and simulation environment that combines the most modern Information Communication Technology (ICTs) and engineering mechanisms digitization, and characterized by system/product/service life cycle management, physically geometric visualization, real-time sensing and measurement of system operating conditions, predictability of system performance/safety/lifespan, complete engineering mechanisms-based simulations. The idea of Digital Twins originates from modelling and simulation practices of engineering informatization, including Virtual Manufacturing (VM), Model Predictive Control (MPC), and Building Information Model (BIM). Based on the two-element VM model, we propose a three-element model to represent Digital Twins. Digital Twins does not have its own unique technical characteristics; the existing practices of Digital Twins are extensions of the engineering informatization embracing modern ICTs. These insights clarify the origin of Digital Twins and its technical essentials.
Asynchronous Sessions with Input Races
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a calculus for asynchronous multiparty sessions where input choices with different senders are allowed in processes. We present a type system that accepts such input races provided they do not hinder lock-freedom.
FAMLP: A Frequency-Aware MLP-Like Architecture For Domain Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

MLP-like models built entirely upon multi-layer perceptrons have recently been revisited, exhibiting the comparable performance with transformers. It is one of most promising architectures due to the excellent trade-off between network capability and efficiency in the large-scale recognition tasks. However, its generalization performance to heterogeneous tasks is inferior to other architectures (e.g., CNNs and transformers) due to the extensive retention of domain information. To address this problem, we propose a novel frequency-aware MLP architecture, in which the domain-specific features are filtered out in the transformed frequency domain, augmenting the invariant descriptor for label prediction. Specifically, we design an adaptive Fourier filter layer, in which a learnable frequency filter is utilized to adjust the amplitude distribution by optimizing both the real and imaginary parts. A low-rank enhancement module is further proposed to rectify the filtered features by adding the low-frequency components from SVD decomposition. Finally, a momentum update strategy is utilized to stabilize the optimization to fluctuation of model parameters and inputs by the output distillation with weighted historical states. To our best knowledge, we are the first to propose a MLP-like backbone for domain generalization. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate significant generalization performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by a margin of 3%, 4% and 9%, respectively.
Privileged Attribution Constrained Deep Networks for Facial Expression Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is crucial in many research domains because it enables machines to better understand human behaviours. FER methods face the problems of relatively small datasets and noisy data that don't allow classical networks to generalize well. To alleviate these issues, we guide the model to concentrate on specific facial areas like the eyes, the mouth or the eyebrows, which we argue are decisive to recognise facial expressions. We propose the Privileged Attribution Loss (PAL), a method that directs the attention of the model towards the most salient facial regions by encouraging its attribution maps to correspond to a heatmap formed by facial landmarks. Furthermore, we introduce several channel strategies that allow the model to have more degrees of freedom. The proposed method is independent of the backbone architecture and doesn't need additional semantic information at test time. Finally, experimental results show that the proposed PAL method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on both RAF-DB and AffectNet.
Horizon-Free Reinforcement Learning in Polynomial Time: the Power of Stationary Policies
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

This paper gives the first polynomial-time algorithm for tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDP) that enjoys a regret bound \emph{independent on the planning horizon}. Specifically, we consider tabular MDP with $S$ states, $A$ actions, a planning horizon $H$, total reward bounded by $1$, and the agent plays for $K$ episodes. We design an algorithm that achieves an $O\left(\mathrm{poly}(S,A,\log K)\sqrt{K}\right)$ regret in contrast to existing bounds which either has an additional $\mathrm{polylog}(H)$ dependency~\citep{zhang2020reinforcement} or has an exponential dependency on $S$~\citep{li2021settling}. Our result relies on a sequence of new structural lemmas establishing the approximation power, stability, and concentration property of stationary policies, which can have applications in other problems related to Markov chains.
Transformers Meet Visual Learning Understanding: A Comprehensive Review
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Dynamic attention mechanism and global modeling ability make Transformer show strong feature learning ability. In recent years, Transformer has become comparable to CNNs methods in computer vision. This review mainly investigates the current research progress of Transformer in image and video applications, which makes a comprehensive overview of Transformer in visual learning understanding. First, the attention mechanism is reviewed, which plays an essential part in Transformer. And then, the visual Transformer model and the principle of each module are introduced. Thirdly, the existing Transformer-based models are investigated, and their performance is compared in visual learning understanding applications. Three image tasks and two video tasks of computer vision are investigated. The former mainly includes image classification, object detection, and image segmentation. The latter contains object tracking and video classification. It is significant for comparing different models' performance in various tasks on several public benchmark data sets. Finally, ten general problems are summarized, and the developing prospects of the visual Transformer are given in this review.
Duality-Induced Regularizer for Semantic Matching Knowledge Graph Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Semantic matching models -- which assume that entities with similar semantics have similar embeddings -- have shown great power in knowledge graph embeddings (KGE). Many existing semantic matching models use inner products in embedding spaces to measure the plausibility of triples and quadruples in static and temporal knowledge graphs. However, vectors that have the same inner products with another vector can still be orthogonal to each other, which implies that entities with similar semantics may have dissimilar embeddings. This property of inner products significantly limits the performance of semantic matching models. To address this challenge, we propose a novel regularizer -- namely, DUality-induced RegulArizer (DURA) -- which effectively encourages the entities with similar semantics to have similar embeddings. The major novelty of DURA is based on the observation that, for an existing semantic matching KGE model (primal), there is often another distance based KGE model (dual) closely associated with it, which can be used as effective constraints for entity embeddings. Experiments demonstrate that DURA consistently and significantly improves the performance of state-of-the-art semantic matching models on both static and temporal knowledge graph benchmarks.
Focus-and-Detect: A Small Object Detection Framework for Aerial Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Despite recent advances, object detection in aerial images is still a challenging task. Specific problems in aerial images makes the detection problem harder, such as small objects, densely packed objects, objects in different sizes and with different orientations. To address small object detection problem, we propose a two-stage object detection framework called "Focus-and-Detect". The first stage which consists of an object detector network supervised by a Gaussian Mixture Model, generates clusters of objects constituting the focused regions. The second stage, which is also an object detector network, predicts objects within the focal regions. Incomplete Box Suppression (IBS) method is also proposed to overcome the truncation effect of region search approach. Results indicate that the proposed two-stage framework achieves an AP score of 42.06 on VisDrone validation dataset, surpassing all other state-of-the-art small object detection methods reported in the literature, to the best of authors' knowledge.
A Deep-Discrete Learning Framework for Spherical Surface Registration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Cortical surface registration is a fundamental tool for neuroimaging analysis that has been shown to improve the alignment of functional regions relative to volumetric approaches. Classically, image registration is performed by optimizing a complex objective similarity function, leading to long run times. This contributes to a convention for aligning all data to a global average reference frame that poorly reflects the underlying cortical heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised learning-based framework that converts registration to a multi-label classification problem, where each point in a low-resolution control grid deforms to one of fixed, finite number of endpoints. This is learned using a spherical geometric deep learning architecture, in an end-to-end unsupervised way, with regularization imposed using a deep Conditional Random Field (CRF). Experiments show that our proposed framework performs competitively, in terms of similarity and areal distortion, relative to the most popular classical surface registration algorithms and generates smoother deformations than other learning-based surface registration methods, even in subjects with atypical cortical morphology.
Continuous Emotion Recognition using Visual-audio-linguistic information: A Technical Report for ABAW3
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a cross-modal co-attention model for continuous emotion recognition using visual-audio-linguistic information. The model consists of four blocks. The visual, audio, and linguistic blocks are used to learn the spatial-temporal features of the multi-modal input. A co-attention block is designed to fuse the learned features with the multi-head co-attention mechanism. The visual encoding from the visual block is concatenated with the attention feature to emphasize the visual information. To make full use of the data and alleviate over-fitting, cross-validation is carried out on the training and validation set. The concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) centering is used to merge the results from each fold. The achieved CCC on the test set is $0.520$ for valence and $0.602$ for arousal, which significantly outperforms the baseline method with the corresponding CCC of 0.180 and 0.170 for valence and arousal, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/sucv/ABAW3.